4 Quotes & Sayings By Stephanie Coontz

Stephanie Coontz is Research Director of The Journal of Marriage and Family. She is also an Adjunct Research Professor at the Evergreen State College, Teaching Fellow at the University of Texas, Austin, and Senior Scholar at the Social Science Research Council. Dr. Coontz is the author of Marriage, A History: From Obedience to Intimacy (Stanford University Press, 2004); The Way We Never Were: American Families and the Nostalgia Trap (Basic Books, 1995); The Way We Really Are: Coming to Terms with America's Changing Families (Basic Books, 1993); A Strange Stirring in America: The Making of the Modern Family (Basic Books, 1977); and others.

1
The idea that in prehistoric times a man would spend his life hunting only for the benefit of his own wife and children, who were dependent solely upon his hunting prowess for survival, is simply a projection of 1950s marital norms onto the past. Stephanie Coontz
2
It wasn't until the 1920s that a bare majority of children grew up in families where the father's labor purchased the family's provisions, while their mother did unpaid child care, elder care, and housework. The Great Depression and World War II disrupted this family form, but it roared back in the 1950s, when the percentage of wives and mothers who were supported entirely by their husbands' wages reached a high that has never been equaled, before or since. Stephanie Coontz
3
Never before in history had societies thought that such a set of high expectations about marriage was either realistic or desirable. Although many Europeans and Americans found tremendous joy in building their relationships around these values, the adoption of these unprecedented goals for marriage had unanticipated and revolutionary consequences that have since come to threaten the stability of the entire institution. Stephanie Coontz